Card victims told 'don't call police'

Victims of debit and credit card fraud are being told not to bother reporting the crime to police.

A change in the law means that from Sunday they should contact their bank instead.

The move was called 'astounding' by security experts, who suggest it amounts to the privatisation of the justice system. They said it appeared to be an attempt by Government, police and banks to push the crime - which costs the nation £428m a year - under the carpet.

The changes, hidden in the small print of the 2006 Fraud Act, cover any deception involving cheques, plastic cards or online transactions. They come into force on 1 April.

Banks will be responsible for collating fraud figures and passing these to police, together with any evidence they uncover of major criminal gangs. But critics suspect the banks will be able to manipulate card fraud figures to mislead the public about the severity of the issue.

They also warned that police teams with expertise in investigating card fraud are being disbanded. Last year, there were 700,000 individual cases of card fraud, with the average loss totalling £608.

The changes were spelt out by The Association of Payment Clearing Services (Apacs), which is the trade body for the plastic card operations of the big banks and credit card companies.

It said: 'In most cases consumers will be required to report instances of this type of fraud straight to their bank or building society and not to the police.

'It will be up to the financial institution involved, and not the account holder, to pass details of the relevant crime on to police.'

The group's communications director, Sandra Quinn, insisted the changes were an attempt to cut bureaucracy.

'This change simply removes an additional level of reporting and will provide greater consistency for the reporting of fraud losses in the UK,' she added.

'Apacs will provide the Home Office with the industry's fraud figures for cheque, plastic and online banking fraud losses - these losses will then be published as part of the Government's annual crime figures, thereby giving a more realistic picture of the scale of this type of crime.'

Where a card is taken as a result of a second crime, such as the theft of a wallet or burglary, these second crimes should continue to be reported to the police. Miss Quinn added: 'The threat of fraud is, unfortunately, a part of our daily lives . . . the industry remains committed to a multi-layered approach to tackling card fraud.'

Card fraud expert Andrew Goodwill, managing director of the security firm Early Warning UK, condemned the shift in responsibility as 'good news for plastic cheats'. He added: 'Our police officers receive some of the best training in the world when it comes to collecting evidence of fraud.

'Why are we now being shortchanged by allowing the banks to collect this evidence? Fraud is a criminal offence. What extra training will bank officials receive to do the same job? I doubt any. With the banks then reporting these crimes en masse, will the banks report all instances of card fraud to the police in this way or will they pick and choose and just report the ones where they suffer a loss? If the banks don't report all card fraud, simply writing some of it off, the result will be a distortion of the extent of credit card crime.'

And he added: 'The problem is that the fraud is increasing rapidly and the police just do not have the resources to cope. Rather than give the police the tools to deal with this, the Home Office has hived the problem off to the banks and tried to bury it. If the criminals see that the police are no longer investigating most card fraud and it is treated as merely a commercial issue, then the problem will inevitably increase.

'The criminals will take the view there is much less of a risk of being caught.'

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